On Wed, 12 Dec 2018 at 16:18, Andrew Bogott abogott@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 12/12/18 5:12 AM, Giovanni Tirloni wrote:
On 12/12/18 7:31 AM, Alex Monk wrote:
Sounds to me like it'd just be more work because someone would have to go around reviewing the tasks it closes and probably reopening the majority. Also it doesn't make much sense to do this at a project-level, if it's done it should probably be across the whole of Wikimedia Phabricator.
If we start small and prove it works, it's easier to expand to make it a general policy. Starting big from the beginning is going demand consensus which will be hard to get, understandably.
Just because there hasn't been anyone to work on the task doesn't mean it's now irrelevant.
It gathers were there is interest from both parties, the one who reported and the one who is available to fix it.
Closing tasks doesn't mean they will disappear. They will still exist and serve their purpose to document what may once been an issue. Also, we can mark them with a tag "frozen" so they're skipping from the automated process.
I think to some degree it depends on the kind of task. If the task describes an actual bug, then it seems wrong to close it if the bug still exists, even if fixing the bug is low priority. There was a recent fracas about this regarding the foundation wiki -- the communication team closed a bunch of issues that they didn't have time to fix, and the reporters took great offense.
My first thought about this is that if an issue real but we just can't work on it, it should be left open but as lowest priority. If an issue isn't real (or there's disagreement about what should be done but the 'do nothing' side wins out) then closing wontfix seems OK. Actually closing a bug that isn't resolved, though, seems wrong to me since people will re-report the same issue rather than finding the existing discussion of an issue.
I agree that there are certain types of tasks where this makes sense - mainly requests where something has been asked for, questions sent back but no response. I think it is already fairly standard practice to close these after a little bit.